The Threat of New Ideologies

It is an all-too-human tendency to mitigate risks only against extreme threats, and position bureaucracy remains in denial altogether, hoping “they” who are above will protect the system against major threats; in reality, the threat of a new ideology, and its strength in focusing the cost structure of an ideological system, is typically imaginary – far smaller threats of operationalization creep into the fissures of the Body Without Organs, exploiting and exacerbating the gap it gradually, accretively fills and expands, like a fungal invasion of an Oak tree. When the Threat of New Ideologies is low, pressure to unite doctrine is low, so the component production factors are prone to sibling rivalry and ongoing schisms.

High threat of new entrants on an Invasive Ideology recording surface gradually erodes the cost of belief demanded by each existing rival. Consider the erosion of belief expectations, in the form of socioeconomic and behavioral changes, exhibited progressively by the people of Judea after the repeated defilement and destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and the progressive schisms of the Roman Catholic Church post-appropriation by the Empire, and the protestant sects that followed. The more an ideological industry complex perceives a new Invasive Ideology gaining a foothold, the more its internal rivals compete based either upon lowering the lifetime cost of belief (mainstream, relativism) with a minority of existing rivals pursuing pure differentiation (fundamentalism) or even narrow focus on luxury ideological offerings (monasteries, ivory towers).

This pressure to reduce barriers to belief can only be re-territorialized against through collusion, maintaining the price of belief, or through increased investment in doctrinal soundness. Collusion to maintain the price of belief goes beyond the emergent “lowest common denominator” of faith in order to ensure believers are beholden to the will of the Clerics, as may be seen in the ideological systems of paternalistic penal law, despotic state taxation, and the investment firms of financial capitalism. If the role of Clerics tends to subjugate to the role of the unifying body-system, collusion is viewed externally as a standardization of processes – one that actors outside the struggle for Information Dominance are unbothered in their ignorance – consider specialized guilds on the frontier middle-class materialism: residential and commercial plumbing or electrical guilds, veterinary medicine and psychology or marriage counseling. Sacred texts with no contemporary presiding visionary produces a slow-moving bureaucracy of best practices. Guild-based practices of arborescent information and prestige networks are the typical method of raising barriers to entry for new entrants with a homogenous Sociopolitical Product.

In contradistinction, many belief systems have unavoidably (or even intentionally) low barriers to entry, and may spread through indoctrination (focusing on the exploitation of state’s education institutionalization complex) or by economic rents guaranteed openly by the state (patent-law or the length of a standardized measure of inches, centimeters) or can only be actively documented by a minority of production process recording producers, who win the long-run game simply through distributed, decentralized, “caring when no one else cares” (dictionaries, lexicons, encyclopedias, journals, and wikis).

We must remain cognizant that it is not the “intrinsic value” of an ideology nor the cumulative will-to-power its macro-organic proponents potentiate; nor is it the actual invasive actions that matter in indirectly shaping, through the recursive reflexivity of valuation-signification, the decisions of entrenched ideological rivalry. Likewise, it is not the objectivity of valuation of the external threat of a new ideological rivalry, it is the signification of its implications for current tensions with entrenched rivals that shapes adversarial decisions in the marketplaces of truth-ideas. Due to this, the threat of a new ideological entrant need not exist at all, nor even be based upon a real ideological system as believed-in, by an actual population of coordinated believers; an outside system that makes no attempt to invade, or exists exclusively in the imagination of an entrenched ideology’s believers, is more than sufficient to shape the nature of ideological warfare amongst existing rivals.

We can likewise see that a macro-organic behavioral jump discontinuity can occur if the audience of believers, perceiving an immense threat, is exploited for the purposes of a Substitute that is not perceived as a threat – even when the “threat” of a coordinated sociopolitical threat is a group delusion. The perception of threat, even in the absence of a coordinated or actual threat, can have powerful implications in the lives of its believers and previously uninvolved bystanders unrelated to the issues at hand (as seen in the countless religion-based or ethnic genocides that occur as a generalization of an ideological threat).

This capitalist system of information production thereby creates truth-ideas in ever-scaling spatiotemporal fractals until direct rivalry perceives an external threat. The surplus value of believer-labor is thereby destroyed by the unifying body-system that can maintain information dominance in order to maintain the tension of adversarial knowledge production – through “Keynesian” investment of surplus ideological value in public works (exploiting patrons into building chapels or funding painters in exchange for salvation), through externalization into a body-system military-industrial complex (the European Crusades, the invasion of third-world countries in the Cold War), or through the investment in applied science, technology, or induced general intellect, typically displacing will-to-power into the Invasive Ideology of a subsequent generation. In each case, we can see that the perception of a sociopolitical threat from a new ideological system, when exploited by the socioeconomic actors with the existing rivalry, may result in sudden physical violence with catastrophic results – war, poverty, genocide, book-burning, and mass indoctrination among them.

This has important pragmatic implications for transformation of an enterprise, as a conglomeration of value-add ideological systems – legal, contract, accounting, tax, finance, operations, et cetera. To the extent we can induce demand for new methods of signaling and signification without the appearance of danger, superficially, to any entrenched ideological system, the more freely we can move among the indigenous knowledge workers unnoticed.